Category: Criminal & Illegal

(I’m on the floor helping a customer in our perfume department. She picks up two full sized perfume boxes and heads up to the registers. The line is long, so I follow her up and ring the line down. Finally, she approaches my register.)

Me: “Hi, again. Decided to just get the perfumes?”

Customer: “Huh? No. I need to return these.”

Me:*turns the perfume around and point to the soft sensors on the back of the boxes* “Seriously?”

(The customer finally looks at me and I can see the instant she recognizes me.)

(A customer and his two teenage children come into the store at the beginning of every month, when they get their food stamps. We don’t sell a lot of food – being a drugstore – but we have basic essentials like bread and milk, and also candy. Every month, they would spend their food stamps on the most expensive candy we have. A few days later, they would return it, without the receipt, which rewards them with a store gift card. They would then use the gift card to get things they really wanted. It takes several months of the same cashier/manager combination to figure this scam out, because they try to buy and return from different cashiers at different times of the day. When we finally catch on, the next time they try to return items for a gift card, they were informed that we would NOT be giving them a gift card, nor accepting the return.)

(I work in a licensee location of a popular shop, meaning it’s inside of a bigger store. After I have closed and mopped, I go to put the mop away in the back room. I notice a young man walk up to my shop and eye me as I walk away, but I don’t think anything of it. When I come back, I notice he has reached around the counter to grab the key to our bolted-down tip jar and is fumbling to get it off.)

Me: “Hello. Can I help you?”

Customer:*quickly hides the key behind his back and grabs a gift card on display* “Yeah. I was just wondering how much you can put on a gift card?”

Me: “I don’t know. I think it’s as much as you want. Can I have the key back, please?”

Customer: “What?”

Me:*peeking around his back* “The key, please.”

Customer: “Oh! Um… sorry.”

(The customer hands me the key back, acting like he didn’t realize he even had it, before walking away. When I go back behind the counter, he felt obligated to come back and tell me that he found the key somewhere else and was trying to return it! Smooth move, pal.)

(I set about making his sandwich while my coworker serves his friend. They pay and I hand [Student #1] his sandwich. He opens the box, looks at his sandwich, nods, and goes upstairs. One hour later, he comes back down.)

Student #1: “There are no mushrooms on this.”

Me: “You didn’t ask for any.”

Student#1: “B****! I want my food for free!”

(This continues for a few minutes before I explain to the customer that I charged him for a five-item breakfast roll, so he didn’t pay for mushrooms. Regardless, at any point during the hour he’d been there he could have come down and asked for mushrooms, and he’d checked the sandwich before he went upstairs!)